Chopbiscuit Interview: Meet Joe Pastry

Editor's note: This is a series of food related interviews with industry professionals, writers, bloggers, executives, farmers and folks who have made a positive impact on the food cosmos.

Joe Pastry baking up some pumpkin scones

Meet Joe Pastry

Joe Pastry, aka Jim Beatty,  is a well known food writer who believes that if a man feels like whipping up a nice almond cocoa genoise or a few madeleines, well…he should be able to. The popular Joe Pastry blog is a site dedicated to baking enthusiasts who also enjoy the science and history of some of your favorite confections. I've gotten to know Joe recently and he's a wealth of knowledge and an enjoyable guy to chat to. I had the opportunity recently to ask him a few questions about the state of food blogs, his passion for baking and what the future holds for Joe Pastry.


Joe Pastry? Tell me how this all began?
 

I’d been working as a baker for several years, in Chicago and here in Louisville where I owned a doughnut business. When that business failed I wasn’t willing to give up baking. Rather I was trying to find an excuse to keep doing it. The food blogosphere was cranking up then, and I noticed that while a lot of bloggers were sharing food ideas and inspirations, relatively few were talking about techniques. Since I’m technically minded, I thought it was a niche I could fill, demonstrating how pro techniques could be applied in home kitchens. I chose “Joe Pastry” because I consider myself an everyday baker (I’m not a trained pastry chef), and I wanted to inspire other everyday bakers to try things that might intimidate them.)

You seem to have a passion for the science behind the craft of baking - where did that come from?

I’ve always been a nerd, that’s the main thing. The kind of person who’s not content to just do things the right way. I have to know WHY the right way is the right way. As a kid I was always full of those sorts of questions, driving my parents and everyone around me crazy. I’m also a perfectionist. Understanding why things work the way they do in baking helps me cut down on errors…which still occur with frustrating regularity.

You have a lot of great followers. How much have you learned from the interactive application of hosting a popular food blog?

 

You’re very right that I’m blessed with an extraordinary readership. Lots of very, very smart people who aren’t afraid to let me know when I’m wrong (which is often). I pick up tips from better bakers, chemistry from real chemists, history from real historians, recipes from people who live in the regions where classic breads and pastries actually come from. That doesn’t mean it’s a forum — I’m too much of a control freak to permit that. But it does create an environment where I can constantly learn and pass my learning on to other people. 

How are blogs influencing the food landscape from your eyes?

Primarily food blogs serve to gin up and maintain enthusiasm for food new trends. I think there’s a big misunderstanding that food blogs are places where food innovation happens. That’s not true in my view. I see blogs mainly as places where people who agree with one another congregate and reinforce each other.  At their worst they’re echo chambers. At their best they are fantastic test kitchens where ideas are subjected to intense, obsessive scrutiny. They can elevate the good — or the merely trendy — very, very quickly. Conversely they can sink the bad or irrelevant in the blink of an eye. 

Joe Pastry 2015 - where do you want to take the blog

 

Blogging for me is a personal exercise, to help me keep sharp as a baker, writer and food marketer. So my plan is to keep doing what I’m doing, hopefully making joepastry.com a bigger and more useful resource. Should I stumble into a way to make more money, that’d be great, but so far the model of giving content away for free hasn’t yielded any real financial dividends for anyone. I know of at least a couple of cooking schools that use the site as a textbook, and that gives me a lot of pride. I’d like to see that trend continue, I hope to good enough to deserve that honor. Otherwise I just hope to keep at it!

(* I would like to personally thank Joe for taking the time to answer some of my questions. Don't forget to head over to Joe Pastry to get your daily bakin' fix.)

Honey isn't actually in my honey and/or fast food facts? Daily Links

Facts about fast food around the world

From Lonely Planet's new book, How to Land a Jumbo Jet, a visual exploration of travel facts, figures and ephemera. Available now from Lonely Planet. Anywhere you travel around the world, you're likely to find a McDonald's waiting: With restaurants in 128 countries worldwide, they're hard to avoid.

The Great Honey Swindle

As if bees weren’t having a hard enough time of it lately, now there’s this: According to a report released last week by Food Safety News, the vast majority of store-bought honey sold in this country isn’t technically honey.

Finally a whiskey for horrible people

With the launch of their first liquor brand, an upstart company called Fabulous American Beverages (or FAB, if you’re feeling suicidal) is going where no other whiskey-maker I know of has purposefully gone before: Ladies Night at the Jersey Shore.

Making Pumpkin Bread (Recipe - Joe Pastry)

I should do more pumpkin recipes, they match so well with my overall color scheme. As with most tea breads, the only trick to this is avoiding over-beating. Otherwise it’s a snap.

Warming up to the Joys of Cask Ale

My wife is not one for cask ale. “It’s too warm,” she bemoans whenever I try to pass her a pint. “And where are all the bubbles?” I sigh, that deep sigh of a married man for whom this will be an ongoing issue till death do us part. “That’s how it’s supposed to be served,” I explain, once more running down the intricacies of cask-conditioned (or real) ales.